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Why I Can’t Stomach Abortion: When Does Life Begin?

Life definitely finds a way

19 May 2018

Abortion is wrong. It is as immoral as the arguments for it are illogical.

This is not about mothers whose lives are physically in danger from their pregnancy. This is about abortions performed not out of necessity, but due to discomfort. A mother and a father’s inability to care for a child should not mean the end of a child’s life. And that’s where the debate lies.

Is an unborn child a human life?

Let’s start with the most radical side of the argument—a child isn’t ‘alive’ until it has been delivered. This is the idea that a mother should legally be able to have an abortion one week before her child is born. At that point, it’s also a straight up killing.

To say that a human being isn’t alive until they’ve taken their first breath ignores what we as a society consider to be ‘living.’ It’s based on feelings and assumption rather than science. If a child were born with the inability to breathe on its own and would have to live out its life aided by machines, would we be free to kill that person at any time, at any stage of their life? After all, they haven’t taken their first breath yet, at least not on their own.

The grey areas become darker as we look at foetuses during earlier and younger stages of their growth. But we can track the attributes of human life and physiology through the increasingly gruesome methods used to kill unborn children as they get older. For example, a foetus in its first trimester may be aborted with a procedure of pills or a method called vacuum aspiration, where the brains are sucked out of the head with an electric pump that also sucks out the developing body.

At the second trimester, abortion methods grow even more disturbing with things like dilation and curettage, where due to the child’s larger and more developed body, he or she must be sliced up into smaller pieces and then scraped out.

Third-trimester abortions bring with them the method of dilation and extraction, where forceps are used to tear off each of the baby’s four limbs so the child is small enough to be crushed and scraped out.

These are the ugly facts of abortion. Many of the organs we associate with humanity and the provision of life are present in us well before we leave our mothers. At six weeks, our heart can beat. At eight weeks, our parents can hear it.

Meet Amillia Taylor. Born after only 22 weeks of gestation, she is a living and breathing example of what an early human life looks like. She is among many other children all around the world who have been born before the limit of viability. These are special cases, but when arguing over something like when human life begins, the extraordinary needs to be taken into account.

The stage at which a baby can live independently from its mother is on a case-by-case basis. But the mere fact that some babies are capable of surviving after only 21 weeks should give us all pause.

I’m not exactly sure when human life begins, but it should be the fuzziness of that concept that pushes us to protect it further, not the other way around. When dealing with matters like this, we should always err on the side of caution.

What I definitely do know is that life can survive very early on. And even before then, at conception, the foundations of it are laid quite clearly. Everyone has a genetic code. From the moment sperm meets egg, the traits that will go on to define you are set, from eye colour to hair colour, body structure, and even aspects of your personality.

Whenever the other side of the argument contrives a factor for life, it’s seemingly pulled straight out from their behinds. An especially atrocious one is the idea that life begins when you can feel pain and suffering. This argument also comes in the variety of, ‘abortions are okay as long as the baby doesn’t feel pain.’

A death is a death regardless of whether it was painless. Yes, a painless death is much better than one wrought with suffering, but that doesn’t mean we can deny a baby their right to life.

Things like first breath, pain, consciousness, and so on, are so incredibly subjective as to make them useless. Life doesn’t come at the snap of a finger.

What isn’t subjective, however, is the fact that if you leave a foetus alone, without accident, and with the natural care of its mother, it will become a fully formed human being.

To snuff that out before it even enters the outside world would be akin to killing someone, except it’s a legal killing, and we call it abortion.

This is the first entry in a three-part series on the issue of abortion

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9 comments

The state of development and the condition of dependency are red herrings that pro-abortion people use to rationalize the evil, the destructive evil of abortion.

It was pointed out to me some years ago that human life begins at conception (also called fertilization) as that is the only point at which life can begin. Conception is the critical event.

I do not want to get ahead of you as you wrote that there will additional installments on this issue. However, I will share what advice I give to pro-life organizations in the US. The demand side of the equation needs to be addressed and not simply ignored. In the rush to reduce the supply of abortion providers through legal requirements at the state level and by attempts at reducing government subsidy of abortion organizations (such as Planned Parenthood), pro-life groups have failed to address who is demanding these abortions. Women are demanding abortions and strategies for reducing this demand have to be developed and put into practice to reduce the numbers of abortions.

I think it’s quite foolish to only look at ways of reducing abortion rates rather than also focusing on the ways to reduce the demand for abortion, as you said. Really, what we need is more education and less disinformation. Right now, many young boys and girls believe that a fetus is not a baby or even a human life.

I haven’t checked the science. But I think a good determination could be made by brain functioning as a human being. Because our brains seem to be the most unique characteristic that separates us from other animals. By the way. I’m neither pro-life nor pro-choice. I’m anti-murder and pro-sterilization 🙂

But that just opens up a whole new set of problems and questions, doesn’t it? If the functioning human brain is what confers personhood, are mentally ill people and those with brain damage human beings? At what point do we consider a baby’s brain to be functioning as a human being? How would we measure it? I think what makes us human is the fact that we’re a part of the human race, with two other humans as parents. In that regard, we should do our best to preserve other members of our species, especially those who can’t defend themselves.

[…] time. It makes it seem as if a woman has the inalienable right to an abortion, something which, I have already explained, is the ending of a human life. It also plays into a much wider problem I have with those who are […]